We made a huge recovery yesterday after only a few minutes in the red. We popped from the uptrend line without even touching it at ($ 9.58/shr) which shows you how much demand there is for BBRY stock.

Thanks for the insight, Morgan. I was thinking about you when I saw this yesterday. You were so close to calling this one perfectly by buying another block at $9.60, but I think it bounced off $9.70. I hope you raised your limit and jumped in on the dip, and I hope there are not many more opportunities at this price for all of our sake.

I like his honesty but a 50% chance of surviving is not exactly the most encouraging number. I assume that he has not gotten the key contracts yet that justifies having more faith in a successful turnaround. Do you think this will affect the stock? I am sure every news outlet out there is going to pick this up.

I like his honesty but a 50% chance of surviving is not exactly the most encouraging number. I assume that he has not gotten the key contracts yet that justifies having more faith in a successful turnaround. Do you think this will affect the stock? I am sure every news outlet out there is going to pick this up.

I love to buy stocks of a company priced for 50% chance of survival and then profit from a successful turnaround. It is like paying 50 cents to get a dollar.

It takes awhile for market sentiment to change. I'm seeing a lot more positive articles on sites that had not published complimentary articles on BlackBerry for years. Granted the articles are about QNX in automobiles and not BlackBerry 10, but hopefully it won't take long for people to connect the dots. Still, I hate seeing news like this.

I like his honesty but a 50% chance of surviving is not exactly the most encouraging number. I assume that he has not gotten the key contracts yet that justifies having more faith in a successful turnaround. Do you think this will affect the stock? I am sure every news outlet out there is going to pick this up.

That "50:50 chance" quote is nowhere to be found in the video interview itself, which is too bad since I would have liked to see in what context he did say that. The interview itself is quite upbeat (on top of giving us a close-up view of the Z3 at 2:59). I urge everyone to watch it. Nothing beats hearing John Chen directly.

I would also agree with the fact that JC has fairly consistently set the bar low and delivered over the last 4 months. It will be interesting to hear from him again at the March EC.

John Chen, BlackBerry's chief executive, said there was a 50:50 chance that his strategy for turning round the lossmaking Canadian smartphone maker would fail, but that he remained optimistic.
Asked in an interview with the Financial Times whether BlackBerry could ever again be more than a niche player in the mobile market, Mr Chen said the process would take time but he hoped the Canadian company could one day become a dominant player again.
It is all about execution now, Mr Chen said, noting that he has appointed a new senior management team that includes a number of experienced industry veterans, and set out a turnround strategy that involves refocusing the company on what he describes as our heritage and roots delivering enterprise-grade, end-to-end mobile solutions.
However Mr Chen, who previously spearheaded the turnround of Sybase, the database software business, before selling it to Germany's SAP, acknowledged that changing BlackBerry's corporate culture is sometimes a struggle. Compared with the Sybase turnround, it is a bit more challenging to engineer change at BlackBerry, he said.
Mr Chen, who took over at the company 90 days ago, initially as interim chief executive after a failed buyout bid led by Fairfax Financial, BlackBerry's biggest shareholder, said that achieving financial stability will be the first step towards his goal of ensuring that BlackBerry survives.
He has set the goal of BlackBerry's cash flow being positive by the end of the current fiscal year, and for the business to be profitable before the end of March 2016. But he acknowledged that, achieving financial stability is much easier than growing the business on to a different level.
As part of that strategy, the BlackBerry chief has negotiated a design and manufacturing partnership with Taiwan's Foxconn electronics manufacturing group.
The first fruit of that partnership is a low cost handset called the Z3 which is aimed at customers in emerging markets, and will go on sale in Indonesia next month for less than $200. BlackBerry has recently been losing market share in several emerging markets, including Indonesia, because consumers are turning to lower cost Android-based handsets.
Mr Chen said his new management team would focus on turning round the handset business and expanding BlackBerry's three other business units its enterprise mobile and server business, cross-platform messaging based on the popular BlackBerry Messenger, and embedded systems.
However, he also admitted that the steady stream of corporate and government customer defections can drain morale. It is important to stay positive, Mr Chen said, noting that while it is hard to win new enterprise customers, they tend to be stickier,as long as you provide good products and service.

In the space of user interface, the "More Advanced" way does not equal to the better way to do things. When people used to something, many of them do not want to change it and they will absolutely hate something that someone forced on them. The good example is the UI between Win 7 and Win 8. Win 8 may be better than Win 7 but lot people (including myself) hate Win 8 because Win 8 took away the popular start up menu.

I'll bet anyone reading that would say 75% loved those new way of doing things in cars. Then I'd say the same group of users, if thinking about classic cars would say 90% of those things should never belong in a 1960's or precious car and would shoot you for trying to place one of those techs in a classic car - sports exotic or not!

Finally I'd say the same group would NEVER go back to owning a car - family, exotic, sports, truck or van without say 40-50% of those technologies. I'm willing to bet Airbags, fuel injection, seat belts, autonatic/semi automatic transmission, would be TOP of their list!

My point... if the new technology evolves and becomes proven, and you force users NOT to go back staying nowhere else to get that option they'll have to evolve soon enough! the legacy items are only available new or used and for so long before supplies dry up! Evolve or die that's the natural order of things. If BlackBerry 10 or BES10 or both really didn't happen, if qnx was not purchased. Anyone on this planet CB Kevin included would be hard pressed to say BlackBerry would still be here today - even if trying to skin an Android device - because there would be nothing to differentiate themselves to; security you say? Just a layer or fork on the code that the competition would quickly figure out and Samsung KNIX would or maybe have a leg up on BlackBerry. Sure Nokia is trying but look what segment their going to hoping to survive in the next 5yrs... low market low profit margins per device is not enough revenue to warrant BlackBerry doing such an endeavor and securing the OS for Android. not in this day yet.

Am I the only one wondering what the heck is to happen with the Android runtime thingy-mc-do, for lack of a better word?

I would really like to see BlackBerry step-up with something solid here and come out of the closet with this, if nothing more than to sell a wack-load of the Z3's abroad, stating support for Android. Let's face it, Android is enormous over 'there', and BlackBerry could really penetrate with this trump card if they move on this.

Every Android user I chat with gets the same spiel from me:
"Why have just an Android phone when you can have a BlackBerry that can also run Android apps"?

Hi, gang, long due, there are some informations regarding BlackBerry Enterprise and devices strategy. These come from an interview my friend David Bensimon (TW @DavidBensimon) from our French leading BlackBerry fans site Blackberry-FR - Le Blog | Votre source d'actualit BlackBerry en franais had during the MWC in Barcelona with John Sims (Worldwide BlackBerry Enterprise division director). David wrote a pretty good piece of article here about it (in French) and was kind enough to share with me (and us now) the recording of the interview and allowed me to share here with you the fast thematical summary of main points covered in the itw I made that David used for his article.

I won't comment much, most are known pieces, but I believe this is a nice summarry where we can verify that the global strategy is set and the trigger near to be pressed for "everything" enterprises.
Here you go. Again, thanks David !

P.S: "" = Exact Sims words (unless I made transcripts errors)

John SIMS / David Besimon. MWC 2014 interview abstracts

“Expanding (the role for BES) in the enterprise”

Focus on applications and applications management

BBM protected : chat encrypted and logged in BES for audits and complaints requirements (evidences). Kinda “BBM lite” since – at first – this first iteration is chat focused. It will be BlackBerry devices specific. There will be other new things in the future.

We will continue to focus on the enterprise as we rebuilt the company and we think that’s the place to be”

BES12

We still have a large base in former BES versions, but a lot of them asked a more complete integration, especially with legacy devices.”BES12 will support everything” : iOs, Android, Windows Phone, BBOS, BB10 … everything”. Policies will be shared amongst all these devices. “We’re working to make upgrade/migration process as easy as possible”.

We introduce a commercial upgrade program called “easy path”; basically, CALs are free for the rest of the year (start paying next year), provided they sign up for technical support.

Easy set up and cost less migration into a very big BES

“We want to bring the whole base forward with us”

“Compared to any other people out here (Good, Airwatch, Mobile Iron, Samsung), our base of BES users is bigger than anyone, by significant margin [10 times].”

BES12 will be available by the end of the year, but we’ll have an early adopter program by the summer. “And then we want their feedback so we can perfect the product before we release it”. We know what we want to do, but we want some users experience hands on returns.

“In the future, I [J.S] want people to want to buy BlackBerry Enterprise software to do all those things : applications, applications development and even manage their Androis, iOS or windows phone devices as well”. ”I want to give them many, many more reasons to buy from us” [read: services versus device driven strategy]

“When Q20 launches, BES12 will launch: that will be a powerful package for the enterprises ”

BES in the Cloud

BES in the cloud is currently “market preview”, we have somehow between 400 and 500 customers running it but market preview means it’s an early adopter program and we’re going to run this for the rest of this year”. “We don’t expect that we will launch BES in the Cloud into production before sometimes [first half] next year”.

“It’s definitely for medium and small businesses so maybe companies that have 5-10 employees; the small business like small law firms, small consulting shops, where they don’t have necessarily an IT department “

“We’ll make the user interface very easy and then they can provision their devices, they can manage the devices, wipe them, etc”

“We’ll charge on a per user monthly subscription […] the cost for the user will be completely “all in” cost [incl.] hardware, software and networking”. It is difficult to compare the cost with on premise BES installations.

Features : similar to BES on premise (no mention of storage or dedicated emails)

Android apps security / professional space

“We are confident [that] the way we have things implemented […] we take our security very seriously. Everything that appears as an issue will be dealt very quickly.”

(Android apps in the workspace) There’s nothing to be announced officially, but we’re always looking to give the apps and choices to the users that we think tey’re looking for […]: all things that makes our devices productive for the users.”

Big enterprises feebback at MWC ?

“We all (BB) are talking to customers all the time, but we have meetings next week in New York with financial institutions, I was in San Francisco meeting with customers last week and in early April, we have customers coming in Waterloo”. We’ll talk about some of their thoughts and directions we are doing. It’s a constant process with our customers. All the new management teams come from the enterprise space”.

“Customers like it, they like the fact that John [Chen] and myself and the other members of the management team all spend the time with them, understanding, listening to their problems.”

“We also discuss with those who decided to leave BlackBerry maybe a year ago [and even those who left already,] because we think, at some point we have a chance to bring them back […] we want them all to be BlackBerry users. New BES and good devices will help.

Devices

More balanced than before, after focusing on consumers, we’re back to Enterprise. Q20 is a request from enterprises users. Incl. trackpad and buttons : that’s what they’ve told us, and that’s what we’ll do”.

“Having Foxconn building devices for us gives us few things; one from our financial stability and […] reduces significantly our risks associated with carrying inventory because Fowconn is much larger, its supply chain carries the inventory and that helps us substancially”.
Secondly: “Foxconn has some of the best design and manufacturing capabilities of the world, so their design and manufacturing combined with our design, we can bring things to market quite quickly”. Z3 is a great example, it will ship in April while “we just signed the contract with Foxconn in December and today we can show you the Z3 working. Between now and April, it’s really about[…], getting the built in sufficient numbers, getting the channel, preparing the channel, educating the channel and get all the promotional around in this Indonesian market”. And we’ll be ready to roll out.

“In Europe we’ll roll out the [Z3] LTE version, that’s on our path”.

“I think the [Z3] quality [compared to BlackBerry self-built devices] is very good. I mean … they build the iPhone” […] and I think it’s a reference on many aspects.

As you can read, many points were "known", yet the BES in the Cloud part is interesting, as we have more official infos here.
Have a nice day gang, won't be much around, still under heavy work load here.
Cheers
SF

I think it makes sense to lowball/sandbag earnings, subscribers, revunue and then over deliver. Doing that with your chances of survival is a much more dangerous game. Probably the first time I think he may have played it wrong and been a bit too honest.

Its on the crawler on CNBC this morning, doesn;t look good, but doesn;t seem to be hurting pre-market. Should be another interesting day in BBRY land.

I really don't think it's intelligent to tell people that the BlackBerry recovery is a coin flip. To be honest, that 50/50 comment makes me nervous and I'm not even a sceptic. I bought at $6.90 and was planning on buying more as we went along, but have recently decided just to sit on what I've got until I have a better idea of whether BlackBerry have decided to stop releasing phones into a void and actually do a bit of marketing. 50/50? Not sure where the wisdom is in that one Chen...

Sorry for OT gang. Morgan just wanted to know your thought about Xoma. After hour stock went down over $2. They stop testing new drug and missed the earning. Thx

A quick response regarding XOMA, they beat on revenues, they lost (- $ .18/shr) as expected on EPS and they dropped a Phase III on EOA and decided it was a specialty drug and not for the masses. They did the right thing here as Phase III launches take a couple of years to complete and a pile of money. That drug had less than a 5% chance of making it to Phase III as EOA type proposals are rarely followed through to the end successfully. I sold it early on its price run above $ 8.00/shr, support is at the 50-dma which is $ 7.70/shr and I would be a buyer again if it heads toward $ 7.00/shr as the price of the stock was over-bought going into the Q report. This company is one of the best business models in the sector and this is a very small setback for it now. We are going to get a chance to buy it back again here so that good for investors like me. I think so few people actually know anything about their pipeline or business model, so many buy these plays because the Baker Brothers own them too. The BB's own a basket of biotech stocks (87 of them) because they are so volatile you really can't hold just a couple of them. If you see a big gain for no apparent reason, it doesn't hurt to sell the stock and buy it back later, the BB's can't do this, but you can. Again, the report was neutral, the reaction is not normal and creates a great buying opp for us now. Good luck.

PS. When I trade stock it is because my basket of stocks become cheap at different times. I sold a couple of biotechs that I want to own because they got ahead of themselves, I simply buy the cheap one which in this case was HALO. HALO dipped far enough to cause me to rethink a couple of other excellent plays and this was one of them. No luck involved here, just a simple plan to rotate into better value plays all the time. So now I hold a huge amount of HALO today and less of the others.

So, Blackberry gets a CEO that finally doesn't sugar coat it and people are upset? I thought that's what people praised him for when he first came on board. You can't have it both ways.

I like everything Chen is doing and saying at this point, aside from how slow they are to complete CORE. We could have ended up with a guy like Cook from Apple, now that would have been a disaster! Our problem today is this long, long, long outage, it's going to hurt us in the press and with our customers.

To be fair, WhatsApp had a major outage shortly after Facebook buyout and people already forgot, they'll forget this outage soon enough.

Originally Posted by morganplus8

I like everything Chen is doing and saying at this point, aside from how slow they are to complete CORE. We could have ended up with a guy like Cook from Apple, now that would have been a disaster! Our problem today is this long, long, long outage, it's going to hurt us in the press and with our customers.

So, Blackberry gets a CEO that finally doesn't sugar coat it and people are upset? I thought that's what people praised him for when he first came on board. You can't have it both ways.

I don't think it's about sugarcoating. Everybody knows that the situation at BB is very very serious.
But only the CEO and his team knows the numbers and the exact strategy - everybody else has to guess.
Therefore it's very important now that the CEO radiates cofidence in his strategy and BB's future to bind existing customers and to win new ones.
The 50/50 statement is not helpful.

A little follow up to the discussion about connected cars and OnStar - today I got this email from my dealer:

I received an Onstar notification stating it is time for an oil change on your 2010 Chevrolet Equinox. If you would like to make an apt with Chevy 21 to have this service performed please call me at 610-838-2200 or email me back.
Sincerely
Darlene
Chevy 21 Service

I don't think it's about sugarcoating. Everybody knows that the situation at BB is very very serious. But only the CEO and his team knows the numbers and the exact strategy - everybody else has to guess.
Therefore it's very important now that the CEO radiates cofidence in his strategy and BB's future to bind existing customers and to win new ones.
The 50/50 statement is not helpful.